PC too full? - Engraving Etc. Forum

From:	LaZerDude (C_BURKE)	17 Mar 2006
To:	Cody (BOBTNAILER)	22 of 24

2999.22 In reply to 2999.1

Cody,

No such thing as an ignorant question.

Several things will make a computer run slower. TOO much crap on the hard drive. A drive that is fragmented. SPYWARE will slow down a drive. A corrupt registery.

Too much stuff? Copy what you don't need ON the drive to a cd.

Fragmented? Defrag. XP has a pretty decent utility.

Spyware? PCTools (available for download) has a great program to monitor and delete spyware. The same company also has a program called "Registery Mechanic". I use both and have had no problems. After running registery mechanic, I DID see a noticable difference in performance.

However as I have been told, and as someone has said, the best thing to do is to reformat your hard drive at least ONCE a year and re-install. But of course you will back up or copy any important files to a cd or alternative drive or tape drive.

I hope this helps.

It was great to meet you in Vegas. I'm sorry we did not have more time to chat

From:	Gary White (GARYWHITE)	22 Aug 2006
To:	LaZerDude (C_BURKE)	23 of 24

2999.23 In reply to 2999.22
There is a chance your comptuer would be slowed down by a lack of hard drive space, your computer uses free hard drive space as something called a swap file. Think of it as RAM (you probably have 128, 256, or 512MB of it) on your hard drive. The amount of hard drive space your computer allocates as swap space is inverse to the overall power of the computer. If it's an older one it will use more than if it's a newer one. Try deleting your temporary internet files in IE, if you've never done that before it could get you a couple hundred megs or more. Try to get yourself around a gig of free space and I bet you will see (at least some of) your problems melt away. Delete some files you don't use anymore, or invest in an external hard drive and move some of your data from your current hard drive to the external one.

From:	UncleSteve	22 Aug 2006
To:	Gary White (GARYWHITE)	24 of 24

2999.24 In reply to 2999.23
And depending on the actual O/S being run, the number of installed fonts can drag it to a crawl since they are all loaded at the same time. Any fontaholics onboard? ;-) "My Karma ran over your Dogma!"